For years, rumors of the "Marsh Girl" have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. When two young men from town become intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new life--until the unthinkable happens.

Perfect for fans of Barbara Kingsolver and Karen Russell, Where the Crawdads Sing is at once an exquisite ode to the natural world, a heartbreaking coming-of-age story, and a surprising tale of possible murder. Owens reminds us that we are forever shaped by the children we once were, and that we are all subject to the beautiful and violent secrets that nature keeps.

From the author Delia Owens:
Why I chose the wild coastal marsh of North Carolina as the setting for my novel:

“Marsh is a space of light, where grass grows in water, and water flows into the sky.”

I placed my novel in the wild coastal marsh of North Carolina for both practical and poetic reasons. The story begins with the young heroine, Kya, growing up mostly alone in a raw-cut shack, deep in the wilds of the marsh. By the time all of her family has walked away for good, she is ten years old, and I wanted her story to be believable, not fanciful. As I write in the first chapter, “maybe it was mean country, but not an inch was lean.” Layers of life – mussels, oysters, crabs, and fish were piled on the land and in the water. The temperature was moderate and firewood available, making it truly possible for a ten-year old girl to survive in this setting.

Just as important, I chose this wilderness because I grew up in South Georgia and was familiar with the bright marsh and darker swamp. My mother and I canoed through these waterways, camped on these shores. Writing about it came easily.

Then there is the symbolism and poetry of the marsh that flows through the story. The bright, open waterways represent a place where human behaviors such as love, family, and learning unfold. On the other side, the murkier swamp presented the setting for less desirable, but sometimes essential, human traits. Most of us must navigate both during our lives, and hopefully find our way back into that space of light.

When Delia Owens was growing up in Thomasville, Georgia, her mother encouraged her to venture deep into the wilderness, saying, “Go way out yonder where the crawdads sing.”

Owens took that advice to heart. After college, she headed to Africa and lived in the wild for decades while studying lions, brown hyenas and elephants in their natural habitats. Over the years, she’s co-authored several memoirs about her experiences, including the international bestseller Cry of the Kalahari.

Now this wildlife scientist and award-winning nature writer has turned to fiction, penning what she calls a “socio-biological thriller” with a titular nod to her mother’s early wisdom, Where the Crawdads Sing.

Set in the coastal swamps of North Carolina from the 1950s through 1970, Owens’ richly atmospheric debut centers on Kya Clark, who was abandoned by her family as a girl and is now surviving in the wild. Locals know her as the barefoot “Marsh Girl.”

Even though Owens’ fictional setting is worlds apart from the remote areas of Botswana and Zambia that she once called home, the experience influenced her tale. “One of the things that interested me most about the animals I was studying is that they live in very strong female social groups,” Owens says, speaking by phone from her current home in the mountains of northern Idaho. She began to wonder, what would happen to a young woman deprived of a pack?

“I was living in isolation,” she explains. “I became determined to write a novel that would explore how isolation affects people, especially a woman, and also how all of those instinctual behaviors I was seeing around me would play into the story.”

A North Carolina setting made sense to this Georgia-born naturalist since its moderate climate would offer plenty of food for foraging. “I wanted this story to be believable.”

A favorite book also helped inspire her literary pursuit: A Sand County Almanac, a classic collection of natural history essays by Aldo Leopold. When Owens frequently recommended the book to friends, however, they complained that it lacked a story. Their reactions led her to a pivotal conclusion: “Wouldn’t it be great to write a book that had a strong storyline but also nature writing?”

Because Owens had her novel’s ending in mind from the start, she began writing from the end, working backward, describing the writing process as “a big word puzzle―a 50,000-word puzzle.” An avid equestrian, Owens adds, “Writing nonfiction is like riding inside the corral, round and round inside the fence, while writing fiction is like taking off at a gait. You just go and see where [you end up], and if you don’t like it, you can make another turn and do something different.

“So I loved it,” she says. “I could kick my horse and go.”

At first Owens wrote chronologically, but she soon found herself with a good third of the story devoted solely to Kya’s childhood. Deciding that “there needed to be a bomb under the sofa that [signals that] something more happens in this book,” she began to interweave past and present, addressing both Kya’s childhood and the book’s murder in alternating chapters.

“It was a bear,” she says of the rewriting, noting that she often set her alarm for 4:30 a.m. to give herself time to write before tackling other duties, and worked on and off on the project for about a decade.

“Wouldn’t it be great to write a book that had a strong storyline but also nature writing?”

Owens knows a thing or two about bears. Now living in a remote valley, she mentions that she’s spotted a mother and cub in the last few days. Elk often wander near her back deck, and bears track across the hot-tub cover. “I just love it,” she says. “It’s where I feel like I belong.”

She shares these many acres with her ex-husband, Mark Owens, although they live in separate houses. The pair met years ago while studying at the University of Georgia, then headed to Africa. “We were great research partners and great friends, and we had a great working relationship for years and years. I think the stress of living there finally got the best of us.”

A question that ends up being central for Kya also remains an ongoing dilemma for her creator. As Owens writes: “How much do you trade to defeat loneliness?”

She admits to sometimes feeling lonely in her beloved Idaho home, acknowledging that her lifelong adventures have required sacrifice. “I realized my mother was right. You don’t really see wildlife, you don’t really understand nature until you get far away from man. And I learned that was my life. It is my life still.”

She based Kya’s struggles on an undeniable fact: “Survival of the wild can be very aggressive and intense,” she says. “And we still have those genes, and we will never understand who we are until we understand the genes that we have from those eons ago. This whole book is about trying to understand why we behave the way we do.”

In the end, Where the Crawdads Sing is about female empowerment. Before abandoning her, Kya’s mother taught her a valuable lesson, saying, “That’s what sisters and girlfriends are all about. Sticking together even in the mud, ’specially in mud.”

That lesson remains close to Owens’ heart. She dedicated her novel to three of her childhood friends who remain close, two of whom happen to be visiting her in Idaho at the time of this interview. “They’re here now,” Owens says, her voice filled with what sounds like a schoolgirl’s joy.

“You know,” she muses, “we all end up in the mud, and I can’t tell you how many times we’ve supported each other after all these years.”

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.